by Ross King
So confident was Sangallo of gaining the commission to rebuild St Peter’s that he uprooted his family from Florence and moved it to Rome. However, he faced competition for the design. Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, better known as Bramante, had a collection of equally prestigious works to his credit. Hailed by his admirers as the greatest architect since Filippo Brunelleschi, he had built churches and domes in Milan and, after moving to Rome in 1500, various convents, cloisters and palaces. To date, his most celebrated building was the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, a small classical-style temple on the Janiculum, a hill south of the Vatican. The word bramante means ‘ravenous’, making it an apt nickname for someone with the 62-year-old architect’s overweening aspirations and vast sensual appetites. And the voracious Bramante saw, in St Peter’s, the chance to exercise his considerable abilities on a larger scale than ever before.
4. Giuliano da Sangallo.
5. Donato Bramante.
The competition between Sangallo and Bramante had repercussions for virtually every painter and sculptor in Rome. A Florentine who had lived and worked for many years in Rome, Sangallo was the leader of a group of artists – among them his brother and nephews – who had migrated south from Florence to vie for commissions from the Pope and his wealthy cardinals. Bramante, a native of Urbino, had come to Rome more recently, though since his arrival he had been cultivating friendships with artists who hailed from various other Italian towns and cities, promoting them as a counterpoise to the Florentines whose careers Sangallo was attempting to advance.4 Much was at stake in the competition to design St Peter’s, since to the victor would accrue wide-ranging powers of patronage as well as an enviable influence at the papal court. And, late in 1505, Bramante’s faction dramatically seized the upper hand when his design – that for a huge, domed structure in the shape of a Greek cross – was accepted by the Pope in favour of the one submitted by Sangallo.
If Michelangelo was disappointed by his friend’s failure to secure the commission, the rebuilding of St Peter’s had an almost immediate effect on his own work. The tremendous expense involved meant that the Pope abruptly put the tomb project on hold – a change of heart that Michelangelo learned about the hard way. After shipping his hundred tons of marble to Rome, he was left with freight charges of 140 ducats, a substantial sum which he needed a bank loan to pay. Having received no money since the hundred florins more than a year earlier, he decided to seek reimbursement from the Pope, with whom he happened to dine in the Vatican one week before Easter. To his alarm, during this meal he overheard the Pope informing two of his other guests that he had no intention of spending another ducat on marble for the tomb – a shocking turnabout given his earlier zeal for the project. Still, before taking his leave of the table the sculptor was bold enough to broach the subject of the 140 ducats, only to be fobbed off by Julius, who instructed him to return to the Vatican on Monday. On Monday, however, he was spurned a second time when the Pope declined to grant him an audience.
‘I returned on Monday,’ Michelangelo later recalled in a letter to a friend, ‘and on Tuesday and on Wednesday and on Thursday … Finally, on Friday morning I was turned out, in other words, I was sent packing.’5 A bishop, witnessing these proceedings with some surprise, asked the groom who repulsed Michelangelo if he realised to whom he was speaking. ‘I do know him,’ answered the groom, ‘but I am obliged to follow the orders of my superiors, without inquiring further.’6
Such treatment was too much for a man unaccustomed to the sight of doors closing in his face. Almost as renowned for his moody temper and aloof, suspicious nature as he was for his amazing skill with the hammer and chisel, Michelangelo could be arrogant, insolent and impulsive. ‘You may tell the Pope,’ he haughtily informed the groom, ‘that from now on, if he wants me, he can look for me elsewhere.’7 He then returned to his workshop – ‘overwhelmed with despair’, he later claimed8 – and instructed his servants to sell all of its contents to the Jews. Later that day, 17 April 1506 – the eve of the laying of the foundation stone of the new basilica – he fled from Rome, vowing never to return.
Pope Julius II was not a man one wished to offend. No pope before or since has enjoyed such a fearsome reputation. A sturdily built 63-year-old with snow-white hair and a ruddy face, he was known as il papa terribile, the ‘dreadful’ or ‘terrifying’ pope. People had good reason to dread Julius. His violent rages, in which he punched underlings or thrashed them with his stick, were legendary. To stunned onlookers he possessed an almost superhuman power to bend the world to his purpose. ‘It is virtually impossible,’ wrote a dumbfounded Venetian ambassador, ‘to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is. In body and soul he has the nature of a giant. Everything about him is on a magnified scale, both his undertakings and passions.’9 On his deathbed, the beleaguered ambassador claimed the prospect of extinction was sweet because it meant he would no longer have to cope with Julius. A Spanish ambassador was even less charitable. ‘In the hospital in Valencia,’ he claimed, ‘there are a hundred people chained up who are less mad than His Holiness.’10
6. Pope Julius II.
The Pope would have learned of Michelangelo’s flight almost immediately, since he had spies not only at the city’s gates but in the countryside as well. And so barely had Michelangelo bolted from his workshop on a hired horse than five horsemen set off in pursuit of him. They tracked the runaway sculptor as his horse took him north along the via Cassia, past tiny villages with posting inns where, every few hours, he changed his mount. After a long ride through the darkness, he finally crossed into Florentine territory, where the Pope had no jurisdiction, at two o’clock in the morning. Tired, but believing himself beyond the Pope’s reach, he alighted at a hostel in Poggibonsi, a fortified town still twenty miles from the gates of Florence. No sooner had he arrived at the hostel, however, than the horsemen appeared. Michelangelo stoutly refused to return with them, pointing out that he was now in Florentine territory and threatening to have the five of them murdered – a daring bit of bluff – should they attempt to seize him by force.
But the couriers were insistent, showing him a letter, bearing the papal seal, that ordered him to return immediately to Rome ‘under pain of disfavour’. Michelangelo still refused to obey, but at their request he wrote a response to the Pope, a defiant letter informing Julius that he did not intend ever to return to Rome; that in exchange for his faithful service he had not deserved such maltreatment; and that since the Pope did not wish to proceed with the tomb, he considered his obligations to His Holiness at an end. The letter was signed, dated and passed to the couriers, who found themselves with little choice but to turn their horses round and ride back to face the wrath of their master.
The Pope would have received this letter as he prepared to lay the basilica’s foundation stone, which was made, ironically, from Carrara marble. Among those assembled for the ceremony on the edge of the vast crater was the man whom Michelangelo believed had been responsible for bringing about his sudden fall from grace: Donato Bramante. Michelangelo did not think that financial considerations alone explained why the Pope had lost interest in having his tomb carved; he was convinced that a dark plot was afoot, a conspiracy in which Bramante was seeking to thwart his ambitions and destroy his reputation. The architect’s plot consisted of persuading the Pope to abandon the project by warning him how it was bad luck to have one’s tomb carved during one’s lifetime, then proposing an altogether different commission for the sculptor, a task at which he knew Michelangelo could not possibly succeed: frescoing the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
fn1 The ducat, a 24-carat gold coin, was the standard currency throughout most of Italy. To give a sense of its value, the average annual salary of a craftsman or a tradesman amounted to roughly 100 to 120 ducats per year, while a year’s rent on a good-sized painter’s workshop in Rome or Florence would have cost ten to twelve ducats. The ducat was of the same value as the florin, the standard currency in Florence, which it re
placed later in the sixteenth century.
2
The Conspiracy
EXCEPT FOR THE fact that the two men were both brilliant, accomplished and enormously ambitious, a more striking contrast would have been difficult to find than that between Michelangelo and Bramante. The extrovert Bramante was muscular and handsome, with a prominent nose and a wild shock of white hair. Though sometimes arrogant and sarcastic, he was an unfailingly merry and generous companion, cultivated and quick-witted. Born the son of a farmer, he had become extravagantly rich over the years, developing along the way a love of luxury that his detractors complained was unimpeded by any moral sense.1 While Michelangelo lived modestly in his small workshop behind the Piazza Rusticucci, Bramante entertained his friends in more sumptuous lodgings at the Palazzo del Belvedere, the papal villa on the north side of the Vatican, from whose windows he could inspect the growth of the new basilica of St Peter’s. One of his best friends was Leonardo da Vinci, to whom he was affectionately known as ‘Donnino’.
The story of Bramante’s plot to force on Michelangelo the hopeless task of frescoing the vault of the Sistine Chapel comes from the pen of Michelangelo’s devoted pupil, Ascanio Condivi, a painter from Ripatransone, near Pescara on the Adriatic coast. Though undistinguished as an artist, Condivi became part of Michelangelo’s circle soon after arriving in Rome around 1550, sharing the great man’s house and, more important, his trust. In 1553, when his master was seventy-eight, Condivi published his Life of Michelangelo. Since this biography was written, according to its author, from the ‘living oracle’ of Michelangelo’s speech,2 art historians have suspected that it was composed with the authorisation – and probably even the active participation — of Michelangelo himself, making it in effect his autobiography. Fifteen years after its publication, another of Michelangelo’s friends and admirers, Giorgio Vasari, a painter and architect from Arezzo, revised the 50,000-word biography of Michelangelo in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, originally printed in 1550, taking on board many of Condivi’s accusations about Bramante and thereby confirming the architect’s role as villain.
Michelangelo was never averse to pointing fingers or casting aspersions. Distrustful and intolerant of others, especially other talented artists, he could take offence or make enemies, it seemed, at the drop of a hat. Influenced by Michelangelo’s version of events, Condivi and Vasari therefore sought to explain the origins of the Sistine Chapel commission by spinning tales of dark intrigue. Bramante pressed the fresco project on Julius ‘with malice’, Condivi insisted, ‘in order to distract the Pope from projects of sculpture’.3 According to this account, the architect resented Michelangelo’s unsurpassed skill as a sculptor and feared that, if completed, the Pope’s giant sepulchre would make absolute and unassailable his reputation as the world’s greatest artist. Bramante anticipated that Michelangelo would either refuse the Sistine commission, and in so doing incur the ire of the Pope, or else fail miserably in his attempt through lack of experience. In either case, he would drastically undermine both his reputation and his position at the papal court in Rome.
As work started on St Peter’s, Michelangelo had therefore come to believe that its architect-in-chief was determined to undermine his artistic career – and even, perhaps, to have him murdered. Shortly after his midnight flight to Florence, he wrote to Giuliano da Sangallo with dark hints about a murder plot against him. His treatment by the Pope was not, he informed Sangallo, the only reason for his unceremonious departure. ‘There was something else besides,’ he told his friend, ‘which I do not want to write about. It is enough that I had cause to think that if I remained in Rome, my own tomb would be sooner made than the Pope’s. This, then, was the reason for my sudden departure.’4
One of the supposed reasons for Bramante’s conspiracy to sabotage the tomb project – as well as, perhaps, to have Michelangelo murdered – was that he feared the sculptor would expose his shoddy workmanship at St Peter’s. According to Condivi, Michelangelo believed he could prove that Bramante, a notorious spendthrift, had squandered the funds allotted to him for the project, forcing him to use cheaper materials and construct inadequate walls and foundations – cutting corners, in other words, in such a way that the building would be structurally unsound.5
It was not unknown for artists to get embroiled in fights or even murders. According to a legend in Florence, Domenico Veneziano was beaten to death in a jealous rage by another painter, Andrea del Castagno.fn1 Michelangelo himself had been on the receiving end of a blow from Pietro Torrigiano, another sculptor who punched him so hard on the nose, following a dispute, that (as Torrigiano fondly recalled) ‘I felt the bone and cartilage crush like a biscuit’.6 Even so, it is difficult to accept Michelangelo’s fears about Bramante – an ambitious but, by all reports, peaceable man – as anything other than either an outlandish fantasy or a fabricated excuse for his hasty departure from Rome.
If the books by Condivi and Vasari constitute self-serving autobiographies of Michelangelo, embroidering certain facts to show how the sculptor managed to reign supreme in the arts despite the machinations of envious rivals such as Bramante, other evidence offers a slightly different version of events. In the spring of 1506, the Pope was indeed considering Michelangelo for work in the Sistine Chapel. But Bramante’s part in the affair was quite unlike the one suggested by Michelangelo or his faithful biographers.
*
One Saturday evening a week or two after Michelangelo’s flight from Rome, Bramante joined the Pope for a dinner at the Vatican. The meal was no doubt a merry one, for both men were notable bon viveurs. Julius liked to gorge himself on eels, caviar and suckling pig, which he would wash down with wines from Greece and Corsica. Bramante was equally fond of supper parties, at which he often entertained guests by reciting poetry or improvising on the lyre.
When the meal was finished, the two men got down to the business of examining drawings and plans for new buildings. One of Julius’s main ambitions as Pope was to recapture the grandeur that was Rome. Rome was known as caput mundi, the ‘capital of the world’, but when Julius was elected in 1503 this title was wishful thinking. The city was a vast ruin. The Palatine Hill, where the palaces of the Roman emperors had once stood, was a mass of shattered rubble among which peasants tended their vineyards. The Capitoline Hill was known as the Monte Caprino because of the goats grazing on its slopes, and the Forum as the Campo Vaccino, or ‘Cow Pasture’, after its own herds of livestock. Vegetables grew in the Circus Maximus, where 300,000 ancient Romans had once watched chariot races. Fishmongers sold their wares from inside the Portico of Octavia and the tanners had established themselves in the underground vaults of Domitian’s Stadium.
Everywhere broken columns and collapsed arches could be seen, the toppled remnants of a mighty – but vanished – civilisation. The ancient Romans had raised more than thirty triumphal arches, of which only three remained. Their fresh water had been supplied by eleven aqueducts, of which only one, the Acqua Vergine, still worked. Forced to take their own water from the Tiber, modern Romans had built their houses beside the river, into which they piled their rubbish and drained their sewage. Every so often the river would flood, swamping their homes. Disease was rife. Malaria came from the mosquitoes, plague from the rats. The area around the Vatican was especially unhealthy since it was close not only to the Tiber but also to the even more noxious waters in the moat encircling the Castel Sant’Angelo.
With Bramante’s help, Julius proposed to rectify this dire situation by constructing a series of impressive buildings and monuments that would make Rome both a worthy seat for the Church and a more hospitable place for residents and pilgrims alike. Julius had already commissioned Bramante to widen, straighten and pave the streets on either side of the Tiber – a necessary improvement since in wet weather Rome’s roads turned into muddy quagmires in which mules sank up to their tails. The ancient sewers, meanwhile, were either repaired or replaced, and the Tiber dredged
to improve both navigation and sanitation. A new aqueduct was built to carry fresh water from the countryside to a fountain constructed by Bramante in the middle of the Piazza San Pietro.
Bramante also began beautifying the Vatican itself. In 1505, he had begun designing and supervising the construction of the Cortile del Belvedere, the ‘Belvedere Courtyard’, a 350-yard-long annexe to the Vatican that would connect the palace with the Palazzo del Belvedere. Included among its features would be arcades, courtyards, a theatre, a fountain, space for bullfights, a sculpture garden and a nymphaeum. Bramante also began making plans for various other additions and improvements to the palace, among them a wooden dome for one of its towers.
7. A view of the Vatican at the end of the fifteenth century.
8. A plan of the Vatican showing Bramante’s improvements.
Another project in the Vatican was especially dear to the Pope’s heart because it involved alterations to a small chapel built by his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, from whom it took its name. In his desire to rebuild and restore Rome, Julius was following in the footsteps of Sixtus, whose reign (1471–84) had witnessed certain improvements to the streets of Rome, the restoration of a number of its churches and the construction of a new bridge across the Tiber. But the most important of Sixtus’s projects had been a new church in the Vatican Palace. The Sistine Chapel served as a place of worship for a body known as the capella papalis, or Papal Chapel, which convened to celebrate Mass every two or three weeks. The Papal Chapel consisted of the Pope and about two hundred senior ecclesiastical and secular officials, including cardinals, bishops and visiting princes or heads of state, as well as various members of the Vatican bureaucracy, such as chamberlains and secretaries. Besides serving as a place of worship for this corporate body, the Sistine Chapel had another vital function, since it was used by the cardinals for their conclaves to elect a new pope.
